8 Tips To Prevent Emails

Ending up in Spam

8 Tips To Prevent Emails Ending up in Spam serversmtp.com

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................................... pag. 3

Don’t buy mailing lists ................................................................................................................................................... pag. 4

Periodically clean up your contact list to not end up in spam .......................................................................... pag. 6

How to use opt-ins to avoid ending up in spam ................................................................................................... pag. 8

Email authentication to avoid ending up in spam ............................................................................................... pag. 10

Take care of your IP reputation ................................................................................................................................. pag. 12

Write good content to avoid ending up in spam .................................................................................................. pag. 13

Track the emails you send, and consult the statistics to improve your results .......................................... pag. 14

Use a professional SMTP like turboSMTP ............................................................................................................. pag. 15

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INTRODUCTION

Whatever kind of work you do, whether you’re sending out large email marketing campaigns
on behalf of a retailer or pushing out pitches for a non-profit, you want to be able to keep your
emails out of the spam folder.
So why do some emails end up in that spam box?
There are two possible reasons. Either the recipient has marked your message as spam; or the
email client has identified something suspicious in your message, perhaps because you’ve sent
a generic and massive mailout without professional support.
Making sure that your message reaches the recipient’s inbox safely is essential for the success
of any communication, especially commercial emails. If your contacts aren’t receiving your
newsletters, offers, and campaigns, it might be because you’re not practicing these eight simple
tricks to prevent your emails from ending up in spam. Let’s see together how to prevent your
messages dying unseen in the spam folder.

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1 DON’T BUY MAILING LISTS

Buying contact lists is a bad idea for three reasons:

NG • The list won’t be structured or targeted, with profiled contacts

MAILIT divided in groups and chosen in a coherent manner.
LIS
• You can’t find spam traps among purchased addresses.
• It increases the chances of your message ending up in the spam
folder.
Building a contact list is an important preliminary activity that
guarantees high returns for your communication campaigns. It’s why
you need to take the time to collect ethically contacts who are really
interested in your services, brands, and products. User reports and an
encounter with a spam trap (an email address that seems normal but
is actually a trap to identify spammers) could permanently affect your
sending reputation and your deliverability.

Why is buying email lists a mistake that can put your

message in the spam folder?

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Your IP or domain reputation depends on your behavior. When you buy a mailing list you are
choosing to send messages to users who have not consented to receive them. That choice
increases the chance of email recipients marking your content as spam. You will no longer have
access to their inbox, and your emails will go straight to the spam folder.
Collecting email contacts for your lists is a long and tiring job. But to get results, you must do it
correctly. There are no shortcuts and any attempt to speed up the process can be harmful. To
prevent your emails ending up in spam due to “unauthorized” contact lists, not only should you
not buy mailing lists, but you should also avoid:
• Sharing your lists
• Email scraping
Sharing lists can seem harmless behavior, especially if you do it with a “trusted” business
partner. In reality, it is not a good way to avoid spam and is unethical. It violates the agreement
you made with subscribers and increases the risk of your emails being marked as spam. A valid
alternative is to recommend your partner in the text of your newsletters, insert their subscription
link, and suggest that they reciprocate.
Email scraping (or email harvesting) is one of the most dangerous email marketing activities,
and is often carried out by spammers. It involves collecting and extracting email addresses from
websites through bots. It’s clearly wrong and will harm the reputation of your sending address.

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 PERIODICALLY CLEAN UP YOUR CONTACT LIST
2 TO NOT END UP IN SPAM

Because your contact list is so valuable, you should create and grow
it with the right methods. Above all, keep it under control so that it
contains contacts that can guarantee the highest engagement rate. We
recommend that you periodically clean up your list by deleting:
• Inactive contacts (people who do not open your emails).
• Generic contacts that indicate a “role” rather than a physical
person (such as support@, admin@, and so on).
• Invalid or non-existent addresses that generate hard bounces.
• Contacts who rarely interact with your content.
Your contact list must obviously also be free of wrong addresses and
spam traps. To find these emails and delete them, use professional
cleaning tools such as the turboSMTP email validator that let you
perform a complete screening of your lists.
The advantages of cleaning your lists are clear. Spam traps may land
you on the world’s major blacklists. Non-existent addresses, such as
misspelled addresses, can make you waste turboSMTP credits. The
reduction of soft and hard bounces will improve your deliverability.

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You can use the tracking feature to identify people who never open your emails. You’ll be able
to remove inactive contacts such as subscribers who rarely interact with your content, or who
didn’t open any of your last ten emails. You don’t need to email people you haven’t contacted for
more than six months.
So how often should you clean your email list? The frequency will vary from list to list but every
three to six months is a good rule of thumb— and definitely not longer than a year.

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3 HOW TO USE OPT-INS TO AVOID ENDING UP IN SPAM

So how should you collect contacts for your mailing list? By ensuring
that users voluntarily subscribe to your list by completing the
appropriate form on a dedicated landing page on your website.
Voluntary subscription to a newsletter takes place through a process
called “opt-in.” It’s a path that, with one or more steps, allows the
user to enter their data then authorize you to send them email
communications. There are four types of opt-in:
• Single Opt-in
• Pre-selected Opt-in
• Notified Opt-in
• Double Opt-in
The Single Opt-in is a simple registration. The user enters their email
address into a signup box. This is the least secure method to acquire
contacts because it does not require any confirmation from the user.
Because you can’t be sure that the subscriber really wanted to receive
your communications it increases the chance that your messages will
be marked as spam.

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For Pre-selected Opt-ins, the registration checkbox is pre-selected. The user just needs to click
to confirm. They’ll then receive a confirmation email at the address provided.
The Notified Opt-in provides for the sending of a “welcome email,” or a series of welcome
emails. These generally guarantee a good engagement rate and help assess whether the
contacts collected are really interested in your content.
The last option is the Double Opt-in. The user signs up, then receives an email with a link they
must click to confirm their registration for your newsletter.
In order to avoid your emails ending up in spam, the Double Opt-in is the best choice. The
double confirmation lets you collect contacts who are really interested in your emails and who
are unlikely to report them as Spam.
To further increase the security level of your list’s contact collection, you could also consider
using a reCAPTCHA. The extra step will verify that the subscribers are real and not spam bots.
Remember, to have a clean and safe contact list, users must be able to sign up easily but also
unsubscribe with equal ease. Many people think that by making the UNSUBSCRIBE button
almost impossible to find, they’ll have a much richer and more profitable mailing list. That’s
wrong. Better lose an uninterested user than win a spam report!
You can design and activate an unsubscribe link in your email footer. A contact who no longer
wants to receive your communications can just click the link, and turboSMTP will automatically
stop sending emails to their address. It makes your list management very easy.

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4 EMAIL AUTHENTICATION TO AVOID ENDING UP IN SPAM

Email authentication lets you increase your sending reputation

and improve both deliverability and server security. Because inbox
providers use an authentication system that verifies the sender’s
identity, it is much easier to pass a provider “test” with an authenticated
email address.
Email authentication protects you and your recipients from spam,
phishing, and spoofing. With the addition of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC
records, you get an even more secure system.

SPF

SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is a standard authentication that

guarantees that the sender is reliable and not a copy created to harm
the recipient with spam and phishing.

DKIM

DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) allows a domain to associate its

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name with an email through a digital signature that guarantees that the message, including its
content and any attachments, has not been modified.

DMARC

Once a message has passed the SPF and DKIM checks, the DMARC (Domain-based Message
Authentication Reporting & Conformance) protocol intervenes and acts as the last “controller.” It
verifies that the DKIM signature is valid and that the FROM field matches the name of the domain
and the IPs declared in the SPF records.

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5 TAKE CARE OF YOUR IP REPUTATION

A number of factors can affect your IP reputation and cause it to risk

blacklisting. If you send a lot of emails (for example, if you are struggling
with an email marketing campaign) you could risk having your emails
marked as spam. You might send emails to addresses that do not exist,
and stumble on spam traps. All of this could cause your IP address to
be blacklisted, with serious consequences for your deliverability. What
can you do to prevent your emails from ending up among the junk?
In addition to cleaning your contact list and not buying lists, you can also
take these three precautions:
• Choose the Double Opt-in registration method with instant
verification of the email address provided by the subscriber.
• Take care of the content and form of your messages, and avoid
spam trigger words such as exaggerated claims or excessive
promises, capital letters, and too many exclamation marks.
• Send emails focusing on the engagement goal, profiling the
contacts you have available, and structuring customized content
that they find genuinely interesting.
Paying attention to your IP reputation will help you reduce the spam
reports and avoid the spam folder.

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6 WRITE GOOD CONTENT TO AVOID ENDING UP IN SPAM

To ensure that your recipients do not mark your email as spam, try to offer
them original and interesting content. Avoid too much text; users will only
devote a few seconds to deciding whether to read your email. And create
responsive emails that are easily displayed on any mail client or device.
To optimize the content for the provider and increase your chances of
avoiding the spam folder, consider these simple tips:
• Make sure you give your emails a responsive design. That will earn
you points as a respectable and aware sender even for the ISP.
• Contextualize your message. Try to give the ISPs as much
information as possible about your content. Optimize and describe
your images, for example.
• Choose a dedicated service, such as turboSMTP, that maintains
stable relationships with Internet providers to avoid being
blacklisted and protect your deliverability.
Remember, the more you can contextualize your message, the more the
provider will be able to recognize and categorize it without putting it in
the spam folder. Content incorrectly presented might not reach inboxes,
even if the recipient wants to receive them, because of action taken by
the ISPs!

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 TRACK THE EMAILS YOU SEND,
7 AND CONSULT THE STATISTICS TO IMPROVE YOUR RESULTS

To evaluate the success of your communication strategy, track your

results with a professional tool. Note who interacts the most with your
content, delete inactive contacts and, in particular, follow the trend of
these metrics:
• Opening rate
• Delivery rate
• Click-through rate (CTR)
• Spam score
If you want to avoid ending up in spam, it is important that you have
a clear idea of the number of people who receive your email in their
inboxes, how many people read those emails, and how many click on
the internal links or your attachments. Only by periodically analyzing
this data will you be able to clean your contact list, improve your
content if they do not guarantee you a certain engagement, and try
another registration method, such as the double opt-in, for better data
collection.

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8 USE A PROFESSIONAL SMTP LIKE TURBOSMTP

Every email matters but the emails that actually reach the recipient matter even more. If most of
your emails end up in spam, it will be difficult to make your offers known to potential customers
and give your contacts the right impression of your brand.
Trust between brands and subscribers is essential for the success of any email marketing
campaign so you need to take care of your reputation, and avoid actions that can cost you
credibility. Professional services can help you choose the best strategies to reach mailboxes and
touch your customers’ hearts.
You should know that the SMTP servers of standard ISPs are sometimes unreliable. They send
your emails through random IP addresses that might be blacklisted. If you want to make sure
that your emails don’t end up in the spam folder, rely on turboSMTP. We monitor blacklists
and we maintain good relationships with the major providers so that our servers always remain
whitelisted.

What are you waiting for?

Reach the inbox, communicate better.

Try it for free now

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